Supermarket Doesn't Sell

photo: www.goodreads.com

Supermarkets are one of the scariest places on earth. Identical aisles of bags, cans, and boxes paralyze the mind, force shoppers to twist their necks around, wonder, Where did I come from, where am I supposed to go next? Carts squeak on streaked dirty tiles, loose wheels spin like mad eyes in sockets. Shoppers play chicken, careening down the same aisles straight at each other, who will yield to the side, who will murmur a heartless apology? Angry faucets open their mouths and exhale freezing mist on decapitated heads of lettuce. Fish gape open-mouthed on slabs of ice, spiny crab legs twitch under fluorescent light. Someone in a blood-stained white apron shuffles across linoleum, hands wrapped around a meat cleaver.

Yes, grocery stores terrify me a little. All that violence masked by civility. This simplistic book cover, just yellow on red, no author name, immediately drew me in. Did someone else find supermarkets terrifying? Did they decide to write a whole book on it?

Sort of. Turns out, the unnamed author is Bobby Hall, aka the rapper Logic. I'm skeptical of singers-and-actors-turned-authors, but I like Logic's music and the concept of supermarkets, so I thought, What the hell? I'll give it a try.

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Flynn is an aspiring novelist, and he frequently locks himself in his room for hours to work. But after months of this, and still no deals with publishers, Flynn's girlfriend, Lola, is done. She breaks up with him at their small town diner, and Flynn spirals into a deep depression.

When his mother forces him out of bed, he finds that he has received a deal from one publisher. He immediately accepts it, but has to finish the novel by the end of the summer. Flynn is determined to finish it, secure the deal, and show Lola that he can be a writer.

He decides to set his novel in a supermarket with a quirky of cast characters, landing himself a real job at the local supermarket to gain firsthand knowledge of what working in such a place would be like. There, he meets the perennially smiling manager Ted, a goth called Kurtis who seems to hate him, a beautiful woman named Mia, and a friend named Frank, who Flynn decides would be the perfect protagonist for his novel.

As Flynn settles into his working life at the supermarket, he finds himself equally inspired to write, and even starts to date Mia. It finally feels like things are working out. Of course, this doesn't last. When Flynn writes the climax of his novel, the same thing happens at the real store where he works, and Flynn is suddenly confronted by the line between fact and fiction.

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Ernest Cline called this a psychological thriller, but it rather lacked the thrilling part (Cline happens to be Hall's literary role model, so take that review with a grain of salt). Sadly, this novel felt like a middle schooler writing his first novel and trying to be cool and edgy.

At one point, Flynn, talking about his own novel, says that he wants to write something that's never been done before, and he frequently breaks the fourth wall with his reader. But I can't even count how many times I've read something similar. This novel lacked originality and it felt like something I've already read before.

Besides the plot, the characters (excluding Frank maybe) fell flat, especially Flynn's love interest, Mia. She's edgy, ambitious, and caring, but has no real personality outside of being Flynn's dream girl. (I am SO tired of male authors creating female characters that are figments of their wet dreams. Sigh.)

Granted, this novel does examine the close, sometimes toxic relationship between an artist and their craft, which is a necessary discussion. In the context of this novel, though, Hall comes close to romanticizing mental illness and making it seem cool, which I don't believe was his intention.

The literary merit of Supermarket is close to zero, but it was interesting to see Logic work in another form. Flynn seemed like a stand-in for the rapper himself, but while I would have expected Logic-as-a-character to listen to rap, Flynn was a hipster sad boy who listened to The Strokes, Mac Demarco, and Tame Impala, which I kind of loved but had trouble squaring away in my mind.

Everyone has mediums they work best in: Logic's is music, not novels.

4/10 📕